Our story begins in the bare forests of Vermont, with me. One water molecule among hundreds of others, formed together as a snowflake that is lighter than a feather. It is a wind forsaken day, and the leaf I sit upon doesn’t stir, though it is dipped low to the ground with the weight of many others like myself. Snow covers the landscape in a never ending blanket. And then slowly, as if in a dream, we watch as white turns to green, bringing with it the melty warmth of spring. The nearby river swells with runoff, and as I drop to the ground, now unfrozen and swift, I feel certain I will be joining it soon. But wait! In front of me.. Something white.. I’m stuck to its sides and become slowly absorbed. Roots. As I travel through the plant, other collected molecules beside me are turned into nutrients, but I find my way to the pores at the top of the leaf, and begin transpiring to the sky above.Oh, what joy! To look down at the beautiful world below me, to see with eyes unclouded by jealousy and hate, and reminisce beside those who have also transpired or evaporated. We continue to rise, and through condensation we become clouds. And again! Happiness! So much happiness that it fills the air! It rides on the wind like its own song as others join the growing mist, and we begin to converse about where we’ve come from, and what we’ve seen on our way. Hearing all these stories made me realized how isolated I’d been. Sitting on the branch. Stuck and unmoving in a snowflake. Of course that snowflake was made up of tens of thousands of others water molecules, but they were all frozen. We couldn’t talk or move, and for all I know one of those molecules could have come from a glacier in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean! Here though, there were more stories being told than I could ever imagine. We weren’t a cloud. We were a community. A family, even. And as the sun set over the mountains, our happiness became so great that we felt we had to share it with the world below. Perhaps there were no humans left who cared for things like sunsets, but if so, than shame on them, because we were a spectacle to be remembered. We bathed ourselves in pink and gold, tinged with an orangish hue. Only when the sun was gone from the horizon did we fade back to a comfortable grey and let the world rest, knowing we’d join it tomorrow as a light spring rain.